america’s best ira - the trust...

BEST IRA2015AMERICA’S

CUSTODIANS

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2015 America’s Best IRA Custodians

Table of Contents

© 2015 The Trust Advisor, All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction all or in part is strictly prohibited without consent.

America’s Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies is updated and published quarterly. Trust companies interested in being included in future editions should email: [email protected].

Disclaimer: The Trust Advisor, TheTrustAdvisor.com and The Trust Advisor e-newsletter (TTA) are not affiliated with any of the providers in this report. TTA makes no representations or warranties of any kind regarding the content hereof or any products or services described herein, including any warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, timeliness, completeness, or suitability of such content or products and will not be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for lost profits) which may arise from the use of any participating provider’s services. TTA was paid a promotional fee from each provider to be included in this report. The content contained herein should not be construed as financial advice or a recommendation for the purchase, retention or sale of any product or securities.

Where Trust Begins ...............................................................................................2Provident Trust Leads List of Top 10 Self-Directed IRA Custodians ...3The Self-Directed Advantage ...........................................................................5The Limits on Self-Directed IRA Holdings....................................................6Two Tips: The Rollover and the Roth ..............................................................7What About Gold? .................................................................................................8How to Find a Self-Directed IRA Custodian ................................................9The Fiduciary Relationship ............................................................................. 10Transferring the Assets ..................................................................................... 11Glossary of Terms ................................................................................................ 12

2015 America’s Best IRA Custodians Comparison ChartsCompany HighlightsProvident Trust ............................................................................................... 14Madison Trust Group ................................................................................... 14Self-Directed IRA Services ......................................................................... 14Kingdom Trust ................................................................................................ 14Pensco Trust .................................................................................................... 14Goldstar Trust Company ........................................................................... 15Millennium Trust Company ...................................................................... 15Equity Trust ...................................................................................................... 15IRA Services Trust Company .................................................................... 15First Trust Company ..................................................................................... 15

Self-Directed IRA Investment ChoicesProvident Trust ............................................................................................... 16Madison Trust Group ................................................................................... 16Self-Directed IRA Services ......................................................................... 16Kingdom Trust ................................................................................................ 16Pensco Trust .................................................................................................... 16Goldstar Trust Company ........................................................................... 17Millennium Trust Company ...................................................................... 17Equity Trust ...................................................................................................... 17IRA Services Trust Company .................................................................... 17First Trust Company ..................................................................................... 17

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BEST IRA2015AMERICA’S

CUSTODIANS

Where Trust Begins Every account that’s set up to hold securities needs a custo-dian. In order to set up an IRA, you’re going to need to sign up with an institution to officially accept responsibility for the

assets. There’s no getting around that basic requirement. The only choice you have in the matter is which custodian you pick to meet your needs and give you the best value for your money.

That said, it’s always a little paradoxical to dig into what makes a custodial institution truly great. The best custodians are completely invisible – except, of course, when you want to know they’re behind the curtain doing their job.

Most custodians fall down on both fronts. Banks tend to be in-vasive, crowding account holders with unsolicited advice and arbitrary restrictions that ultimately serve the institution and not the customer.

When they’re quiet, the silence often means that they’re paying more attention to their own corporate goals than what’s going on in your ac-count. And when they speak up, it’s often because you’re getting in the way of that corporate agenda.

A lot of custodians operate like utilities selling a commodity service. They offer mostly the same experience that everyone else does, so they com-pete on price, hoping that a discount of a few basis points or even a few dollars a year will bring the

accounts in the door. If that’s the kind of experience you want, you already know how to haggle your way into a better deal.

But if you don’t want the cookie-cutter experience or have as-sets that require special handling, a few bucks off the sticker price isn’t going to help. You probably want a better return opportunity than the CDs and money market accounts a bank has on its shelf. Maybe even stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs aren’t doing it for you—it’s hard to argue that a broader mix of asset classes isn’t beneficial from a diversification point of view.

The tax rules will let you buy privately traded companies, real estate and even precious metals in an IRA. Your imagination can run wild . . . you just have to find a custodian that can keep up with you. Likewise, if you need more complex service once the assets are on the books, the commodity players are going to have trouble keep-ing up with the paperwork.

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Provident Trust Leads List of Top 10 Self-Directed IRA CustodiansVery few people can name even three self-directed IRA cus-

todians, let alone rank the leaders. We managed to do it, but the structure of the industry practically ensured that it would

be an uphill battle to find this type of firm in the noise.The custody business—and it is a business—looks like a barbell.

The trillion-dollar giants are clustered on the deep end, just about everyone else is clinging to niches on the shallow side and there aren’t many players who bridge the gap.

Big custodians won’t play by your rules. They won’t even sup-port all the options the IRS says you have. If you try to go outside their comfort zone, even if it’s just to buy an ETF they don’t want to work with, they’ll tell you it’s impossible.

The tiniest custodians are often set up around a particular exotic asset class. Maybe they specialize in holding physical gold and silver bullion for local customers. Or maybe an in-house expert gives them the ability to evaluate working real estate or stock in non-traded companies.

Either way, since these boutique institutions have a narrow but captive market, most will charge their customers a significant pre-mium – and with their relatively limited scale, they probably don’t have the operational efficiencies it takes to do a lot of discounting even if they wanted to cut you a break.

Between the boutiques and the behemoths, there aren’t a lot of people with the scale to operate across the board on a cost-effective basis and provide truly customer-centered support. That’s where the “barbell” comes in: competition in what would ordinarily be a mid-market bulge bracket is extremely thin. Factor out the multi-billion-dollar firms in that sweet pot that won’t deal with alternative assets or truly independent investors, and the list gets even shorter.

This makes every name on that list even more precious. When we polled Trust Advisor readers on their favorite IRA custodian, ten firms earned enough votes to make an impact on the results, but the runaway winner was Provident Trust in Nevada.

Provident combines the institutional scale and resources to take on the giants on something like a head-to-head basis, while beat-ing the boutiques for breadth as well as depth of service. The oth-ers have their followings, but tend to veer just a bit too far from the sweet spot in terms of size (a little too small to keep up, a little big to treat retail investors right) or platform (supporting gold, for ex-ample, but not real estate) to win the prize.

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Odds are good that if Provident can’t make a deal on your ac-count that compares to what the trillion-dollar companies are charg-ing, you’ve got so much money that it doesn’t really matter. Their cost structure is low and they’re happy to pass on the benefits of that institutional-grade scale if it means winning you as a customer.

And unlike the fringe specialists, Provident covers the known universe of alternative asset classes and even goes beyond what each of the boutiques can offer individually. Over the years I’ve watched them create and structure new instruments to let their customers go wherever the market winds take them: life insurance settlements, bundled pension income products and a lot more, in addition to real estate, limited liability corporation (LLC) holdings and precious metals.

Needless to say, they’re also happy when their customers trade vanilla securities and mutual funds. But they’ll rise to the challenge if you want something more exotic, provided of course that there’s a way to structure it in a way that keeps the IRA and other regulators happy.

Our readers were also impressed with the way Provident takes the “self-directed” part of the IRA relationship to heart. Unlike the banks and brokerage-driven custodians that dominate the retire-ment account universe, there are no “helpful” in-house monitors to

All rankings from reader survey conducted 1Q 2015.

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The Self-Directed Advantage

point you toward proprietary products or away rom your chosen course as an investor.

Provident won’t get in the way if the IRS says you can do it and there’s a realistic way to make it happen. That sounds simple, but in the world of IRA custody, you’ll quickly find that not many firms actually back up the words with action.

They’ll actually leave you alone. As long as none of the regu-latory red flags go up, they’re practically invisible: operating in the background while you run the account the way you like.

Remember when I talked about what distinguishes a great cus-todian from everyone else? Provident has it. I’m sure every firm on our Top 10 list will espouse a comparable philosophy, but this was the name that resonates most strongly with our readers.

In theory, every IRA is a self-directed account in the sense that you’re calling the shots on what goes in and what goes out. How-ever, because about 98% of investors are content to rely on what-

ever’s on the custodian’s shelf, the options are generally limited a fairly wide selection of mutual funds -- maybe better than the menu you’d get in a 401(k) but still only a fraction of what’s really available even within the asset class.

As you move up the scale, other custodians will add stocks and ETFs to the mix. Individual bonds are tricky, especially when you start moving away from vanilla Treasury debt. Many IRA investors actually end up having to make do with bond mutual funds, which are actually a completely different animal. (For one thing, they nev-er pay back the principal on maturity.) Banks will focus on banking products like certificates of deposit and money market accounts.

If you like stocks and mutual funds, it’s a candy store. But for investors who can squeeze higher returns out of private enterprise —private equity or a working farm, for example—or simply want a more diversified footprint, stocks and mutual funds all start to taste alike after awhile.

There’s well over $100 billion in alternative assets already parked in true self-directed IRAs. Mitt Romney’s famous multi-million-dollar nest egg has more money than most Americans will ever see allo-cated to just one Caribbean hedge fund, and other masters of the universe have adopted similar strategies that let their richest hold-ings accumulate value on a tax-deferred basis.

Slightly more humble strategies revolve around real estate, a private business or gold and silver as a vital hedge against infla-

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The Limits on Self-Directed IRA Holdings

tion or a crashing dollar. You can always buy into a precious metals ETF in a conventional IRA, but at the end of the day you’ll only be holding shares of paper. A self-directed IRA gives you the power to hold tangible bullion in the same account, all under the approval of the IRS itself.

As long as you obey the IRS rules, the only thing you need to put any of these market tactics into practice is a custodian that will actually admit the assets onto its platform. We’ve already discussed that this can be harder than it sounds.

From a conventional custodian’s perspective, alternative assets are a little trickier to manage because they don’t fit into a standard-ized box – you can exchange one share of Apple for billions of iden-tical shares, but every parcel of real estate is unique – and that trans-lates into operational drag.

In plain terms, most of them don’t want to deal with the head-aches. If you come to them with an IRA holding anything out of the ordinary, they’ll make you sell it before they let you in the door.

That said, it’s not a completely open playing field. Any custo-dian that works with alternative assets will understand and enforce the IRS restrictions on IRA portfolios.

Every IRA starts with cash. You can’t contribute real assets directly. To move the assets into your self-directed IRA, you need to direct the IRA to purchase them at a fair market price. A good custodian will be familiar with the process of evaluating the assets and smoothing the transaction.

You can’t buy and sell from yourself. No IRA transaction will hold up if you’re simply using it as a way to move your own property into a tax-deferred structure or otherwise using the assets to benefit yourself. You can’t direct your IRA to buy your own business and keep drawing a paycheck, for example. And your IRA can’t buy the family home and keep living there rent-free. There are ways to get around a lot of the restrictions, but once again, a good self-directed IRA custodian will know how they work.

Family is off limits, too. If your IRA bought stock from a relative, it would simply amount to a statistical fluke of the market, but buying a business or an investment property from your parents looks fishy. Moreover, using the assets for the benefit of any family member is right out. Your IRA can’t hire your kids

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Two Tips: The Rollover and the Roth

or “invest” in their educations without taking the tax penalties of a normal distribution.

Distributions are a fact of life. Remember, when you hit age 70-1/2 you have to start winding your IRA down, and for your heirs the timetable can compress by decades. Cash and securities can be sold off to meet annual distribution requirements, but a single farm is hard to split up. If the assets generate significant cash, you might be all right. Otherwise, consider leaving some cash or marketable securities in the account to cover the RMD, structuring the illiquid holdings on a multiple-share basis to allow gradual conversion into cash, or both. If your custodian can’t help you here, consider finding one that can.

Steer clear of the shysters. Dubious “investment” vehicles have brought down banks, brokerage networks and even whole governments. While the custodian isn’t responsible for keeping you from making bad calls – that would defeat the purpose – the odds are good they’ve seen most of the common scams already. If they don’t want something on your platform, they should be able to justify the refusal or, better, give you an alternative that measures up.

Collectibles don’t count. While you can hold antiques, fine wines, classic cars and other personal property in an IRA, every dollar you use to buy the stuff counts as a fully taxable distribution. This may not wholly defeat the purpose of having these investments in the retirement account, but the initial drag can be substantial. Knowing the technicalities is critical.

Life insurance is tricky. While no IRA can buy life insurance – on yourself or anyone else – the arguments for pooled “viatical” products that buy multiple policies are more complex. If this approach to generating income interests you, make sure your custodian can work with you to find the vehicles that have the best prospects for meeting IRS and SEC requirements.

You’re allowed to roll 401(k) assets over into a self-directed IRA under just about any scenario where a normal rollover would be an option. This is a great way to amass a lot more than

the relatively stingy $5,500 per year the government allows you to contribute directly as of 2015.

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What’s more, the unlimited investment universe of the self-di-rected IRA will probably give you a lot more room to move than any 401(k) investment menu, no matter how well constructed your em-ployer plan may be or how many choices it provides. Nearly all 401(k) sponsors focus on mutual funds and some form of constant-value alternative, broadening out to individual stocks at best. If you want more freedom, move the money into an IRA whenever you can.

And of course, self-employed people get a lot more leeway with contributions in general. A SIMPLE IRA can accept $12,500 per year and a SEP can theoretically take $53,000 per year if the underlying income stream is big enough. As with conventional IRA investing, the goal is always to move as much money as possible into the tax-deferred vehicle where it can grow without IRS intervention for years or even generations.

Either way, there’s nothing stopping you from rolling a 401(k) into a self-directed Roth vehicle or converting a traditional IRA to get the Roth benefits. You’ll have to pay the tax up front, but once you’re working with post-tax dollars, this account will grow free from IRS drag forever.

Any self-directed IRA that holds physical precious metals is often described as a “gold IRA,” but this is more a marketing term than a hard-and-fast classification. The same account

can theoretically contain bullion as well as real estate, cash and se-curities, or any combination of other allowed assets.

Where the “gold IRA” differs from conventional accounts is of course the fact that bullion and coins need to be stored in a secure place whereas cash and fund shares can exist in a purely electronic format. Once again, a veteran self-directed IRA custodian should have relationships with bonded storage companies that can meet your needs—generally the “vault” in these cases is a commingled fa-cility where multiple investors share space, but other arrangements are feasible for the right price.

As usual, you can’t simply move your existing gold or silver into an IRA, no matter how familiar the custodian may be with the self-di-rected approach. The account will need to be started with cash that is then spent down to buy the metal and pay storage fees. Any required distributions will then liquidate the metal, paying back out in cash.

What About Gold?

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For many investors, the choice of IRA custodian revolves around price. If they get a bargain on the fees, they’re happy. Others feel trapped by the relatively limited number of institutions willing

to support an esoteric or exotic investment plan, so will go with the first firm that says “yes,” regardless of fee structure or reputation.

The real secret to picking the right partner is patience. Unless you find the right match right away, it’s all right to keep interviewing custodians until your contribution deadline or rollover clock starts ticking down.

When we asked Trust Advisor readers, three factors sealed the deal. You want to see:

n Reputation and length of time in the businessn Quality of service based on testimonials and referralsn Availability of in-house experts

As you’ll see, price is not even an issue at this level. Instead, start with the basic homework, making sure each prospective partner’s regulatory and business profiles are clear of complaints that can’t be addressed. Management should be able to explain any historical disputes to your satisfaction.

Ask any custodian on your short list if it can handle all of the asset classes you are contemplating. Get concrete examples of how this has worked out in practice. Were there additional fees? Did diffi-culties arise from a tax or regulatory perspective? How did the com-pany respond to challenges in these areas and put stronger prac-tices in place?

Operational risk is your responsibility to investigate. You want a partner with the scale to keep going if things get bad in the markets or if mistakes are made. Check error-and-omissions insurance, FDIC coverage (if applicable) and audit status. You may not need to see the balance sheet, but it’s good to see that someone is giving the books a check-up and certifying the results.

References and testimonials are always helpful, but while you’re asking questions be sure to o establish a rapport with the personnel who will be directly responsible for your account. If you trust them, it will go a long way. Otherwise, third-party commentary will help you gauge their level of expertise and give you a sense of how good the service actually is.

Once your relationship with a custodian reaches this point, go ahead and start talking price. Odds are good that the overall cost of the relationship will be fairly low. Ask about breakpoints – you

How to Find a Self-Directed IRA Custodian

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might qualify for a better deal depending on the amount of assets you are willing to transfer. And naturally, you’ll want to investigate any hidden or contingent fees.

A self-directed IRA custodian isn’t going to manage your in-vestments for you or do the due diligence on products you pick, but it does have a responsibility to keep everything

running smoothly. The custodian is a fiduciary, which means it needs to act in your

interests as far as the relationship is concerned. The level of observa-tion and, if needed, interference with your account will vary from firm to firm, depending on the principals’ sense of what it will take to manage their own liability if for some reason things go wrong.

Some firms take a strict “hands off” approach, declining all re-sponsibility if an investment goes wrong or was fraudulent to begin with. The custodians that handled accounts that dealt with Bernard Madoff fall into this group.

Other firms will at least passively check to make sure that the investments are on track. This is more onerous for them and some investors are not enthusiastic about having someone watching over their shoulders, but others find it comforting to know that the cus-todian is on duty.

For a true self-directed IRA, the custodian should never tell you what to do without having a convincing reason. If you are contem-plating an investment, they should speak up if they are unwilling to work with it. Again, a firm that provides better alternatives instead is probably ideal.

Meanwhile, the custodian will keep the account running be-tween IRS filing deadlines and regulatory audits. As long as that bur-den of bookkeeping is being served, the firm is complying with its duties and can hold title to assets in your name.

The financial marketplace is also full of administrators and pro-moters who cannot act as pure custodians. These entities perform data entry, market products and handle other peripheral tasks, but do not actually hold your assets. If you are ever in doubt where a firm or individual stands in these terms, make sure to ask. Get verifi-cation if necessary.

The Fiduciary Relationship

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Transferring the AssetsOne last note: you can always transfer an IRA from custodian to custodian. While it may be convenient to liquidate the first IRA, move the cash and then buy the assets back into the

new account, the logistics of such a move can get complex. Instead, your custodian will probably suggest a transfer of the assets in kind, simply moving the title from platform to platform.

You don’t have to transfer an entire IRA. Part of the money may move to a new custodian in order to invest in assets that your cur-rent account is not allowed to touch. This happens all the time.

The important consideration here is that you never accept own-ership of the assets while the process is ongoing. You don’t want to trigger a taxable distribution, much less roll a tax-diminished ac-count balance into the new IRA. In most scenarios, all you’ll need to do is open the new account—the custodian will help you with everything that follows.

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Asset Protection Trust: Any trust designed to protect property from potential creditors, court judgement or other legal liability.

Beneficiary: Person or entity entitled to receive benefits from a will, insurance policy, trust agreement or employee benefit plan.

Charitable Remainder Trust: An irrevocable trust with both income and remainder interest. Income is paid to designated beneficiaries for a term or lifetime. The remainder interest is paid to qualified organizations as specified in the trust when the trust terminates.

Corporate Trustee: A trust institution serving as trustee.

Delegated Trust: A delegated trust is an arrangement that allows the trustee to assign responsibility for managing the trust’s assets to an outside advisor. (See also: Directed Trust.)

Directed Trust: A directed trust is an arrangement that allows the advisor to hand off the responsibility and burden of administering a trust to an outside corporate trustee but retain control over how the assets are invested. (See also: Delegated Trust.)

Directed Trust Company: Any corporate trustee that supports and encourages directed trust relationships. These companies are generally not interested in managing the assets themselves and so have little or no motive to replace existing advisors.

Durable Power of Attorney: A power of attorney that will come into effect and remain in effect and valid if the person who grants the power becomes incapacitated.

Dynastic Trust: While some states force trusts to terminate after a few generations, others allow trusts to operate for centuries or even, theoretically, forever. These long-lasting arrangements are known as dynastic or “perpetual” trusts.

Estate: The real and personal property of a decedent; a specific interest in property.

Fiduciary: An individual or entity in position of trust who has accepted the duty of acting for the benefit of another.

Grantor/Settlor: A person who transfers property, the creator of a trust.

Generation Skipping Tax (GST): A tax levied on gifts to people separated by the donor by more than one generation: grandparent to grandchild, for example.

Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust: Typically used to shelter an insurance death benefit from estate taxes and may provide liquidity to pay estate taxes and settlement costs. A trust is created, then the trust purchases a life insurance policy.

Irrevocable Trust: A trust that, by its terms, cannot be revoked or changed by the grantor.

Glossary of Terms

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Living Trust: A trust that is operative during the lifetime of the grantor; as opposed to a trust under will or a testamentary trust. Also known as an inter vivos trust.

Power of Attorney: A legal document appointing someone to act as one’s agent with legal authority to sign your name, on your behalf, in your absence. Power of Attorney ends at incapacity (unless it is a durable power of attorney) or death.

Remainderman: The person who is entitled to an estate after the prior estate has expired.

Revocable Trust: A trust that by its terms may be terminated by the settlor or by another person.

Successor Trustee: Person or institution named in the trust document who will take over should the first trustee die, resign or otherwise become unable to act.

Trust: An entity that holds assets for the benefit of certain other persons or entities.

Trustee: Person or institution who manages and distributes another’s assets according to the instructions in the trust document.

Uniform Trust Code States: Many states have attempted to streamline and standardize their trust rules by adopting these provisions as their model.

Will: A written document with instructions for the distribution of an individual’s assets after death.

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2015 America’s Best IRA Custodians Comparison Chart

Provident Trust

Group

Madison Trust Company

Self Directed IRA Services, Inc.

Kingdom Trust Company

PENSCO Trust Company

8880 W. Sunset Rd., Ste 250

Las Vegas, NV 89148

https://trustprovident.com/

401 East 8th Street Suite 200P

Sioux Falls, SD 57103

https://www.madisontrust.com

215 Mary Avenue, Suite 311

Waco, Texas 76701https://www.

sdiraservices.com/

PO Box 870 Murray, KY 42071

http://www.kingdomtrustco.

com/

PO Box 7576 San Francisco, CA

94120-7576https://www.pensco.com

Highlights /

New Business Contact

Lindsay Mersino(888) 855-9856

[email protected]

Charles Knopf VP, Business

Development(845) 947-1000 x 339

[email protected]

Ryan Schneider, Vice President

(866) 928-9394, ext. 4004

[email protected]

Tara Bogard, Business

Development Officer(888) 753-6972

[email protected]

Cynthia Weaver EVP, Institutional

Sales and Strategy(415) 395-5728

[email protected]

Is your company a trust company?

Yes Yes No (subsidiary of a bank)

Yes Yes

Total Assets Under Administration

$3 billion Between $50 and $500 million

$800 million $6 billion $10.4 billion

Number of IRA custodian accounts

30,000 Over 3000 16,000 65,000 46,000

Fees $395 $180 + $100-$300 $75+ $200+Phone support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Number of employees

48 15 25 20-30 185

Support qualified plans?

Yes No Strictly an IRA custodian

Yes Yes

Quality of website Very Good Good Very Good Very Good Excellent

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GoldStar Trust Company

Millennium Trust Company

Equity Trust Company

IRA Services Trust Company

First Trust Company of Onaga

1401 4th Avenue Canyon, TX 79015

http://www.goldstartrust.com//

2001 Spring Road, Suite 700

Oak Brook, IL 60523http://www.

mtrustcompany.com

1 Equity Way Westlake, OH 44145

https://www.trustetc.com

1160 Industrial Rd, Ste 1

San Carlos, CA 94070

https://www.iraservices.com/

214 W. 9th Street Onaga, KS 66521

https://www.ftconaga.com/

Highlights /

New Business Contact

Heather Adams Director of Business

Development(800) 486-6888

[email protected]

Lauren Ciluffo Sales & Marketing

Coordinator(630) 891-6114

[email protected]

Kent Kinzer, Natl. Busi-ness Development

Manager (888) 382-4727

[email protected]

Michael McNair – Trust Officer

(800) [email protected]

Marleen Holthaus, VP(800) 521-9897

mholthaus@ftconaga. com

Is your company a trust company?

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Total Assets Under Administration

$1.9 billion $12.5 Billion $12 billion $4 billion $7.9 billion

Number of IRA custodian accounts

37,000 342,182 130,000 40,000 120,000

Fees $65+ $50 +, $350 + $195 + $96+ $95-125 plus feesPhone support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Number of employees

60 204 350 NA 44

Support qualified plans?

No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Quality of website Very Good Excellent Excellent Very Good Very Good

Self-Directed IRA Investment choices:

Annuity xCattle XCDsCommoditiesCoverdell Education AccountsEnergy, oil, gasEquipment leasesForeign bank accountsForeign currencyFranchisesGovernment securitiesHealth Savings Accounts Hedge FundsLimited PartnershipsLPs/LLCsMineral rights certificatesMortgages/Deed of TrustOffshore fundsOil and gas investmentsPrecious MetalsPrivate EquityPrivate placementPrivate StockPromissory NotesReal EstateREITStructured settlementsTax liensTimber rightsTraditional (stocks, bonds)Treasuries

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Self-Directed IRA Investment Choices

Provident Trust

Group

Madison Trust

Company

Self Directed IRA Services,

Inc.

Kingdom Trust

Company

Pensco Trust

CompanyAlternative InvestmentsAnnuityBonds (Church, Municipal, Corporate or Govt)

CattleCDsCommoditiesConvertible NotesCoverdell Education AccountsEnergy, Oil, GasEquipment LeasesForeign Bank AccountsForeign CurrencyFranchisesFuturesGovernment SecuritiesHealth Savings AccountsHedge FundsIRALimited PartnershipsLPs/LLCsMineral Rights CertificatesMortgages/Deed of TrustOffshore FundsOil and Gas InvestmentsPrecious MetalsPrivate EquityPrivate PlacementPrivate StockPromissory NotesReal EstateREITSelf-Directed IRAsSEPStructured SettlementsSwiss AnnuitiesTax LiensTimber RightsTraditional (stocks, bonds)

Treasuries

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Self-Directed IRA Investment Choices

Goldstar Trust

Company

Millennium Trust

Company

Equity Trust

Company

IRA Services Trust

Company

First Trust Company of

OnagaAlternative InvestmentsAnnuityBonds (Church, Municipal, Corporate or Govt)

CattleCDsCommoditiesConvertible NotesCoverdell Education AccountsEnergy, Oil, GasEquipment LeasesForeign Bank AccountsForeign CurrencyFranchisesFuturesGovernment SecuritiesHealth Savings AccountsHedge FundsIRALimited PartnershipsLPs/LLCsMineral Rights CertificatesMortgages/Deed of TrustOffshore FundsOil and Gas InvestmentsPrecious MetalsPrivate EquityPrivate PlacementPrivate StockPromissory NotesReal EstateREITSelf-Directed IRAsSEPStructured SettlementsSwiss AnnuitiesTax LiensTimber RightsTraditional (stocks, bonds)

Treasuries

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